Tuesday, February 28, 2017

“Well, it should be,” said Lady. “You do know more than 31
pieces of music, don’t you?”

“Yeah, and that’s the problem. I don’t just want to do an
electronic version of ‘Classical Music for Sunday Mornings.’ And God knows I
don’t want to do ‘Mozart for Baby.’”

“What’s the matter with Mozart for babies?”

“You know, Mozart is not a vitamin pill. And there are at
least 30,000 better reasons to listen to Mozart than the alleged boost to
cognition, or whatever it is. I’m so tired of all this business of justifying
classical music education based on the supposed neurological benefits. Do we
study literature because of its effect on the brain? Or art? Of course not. Oh,
and notice that the football coach never has to jump through those
hoops….”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Well, in the first place, what to do with the war-horses?”

“War-horses?”

“You know,” I told her, “Beethoven’s Fifth, the William Tell
Overture, Carmina Burana, and that damn Bolero. The problem is that some of
them are wonderful pieces, but who can hear William Tell without thinking of
the Lone Ranger? Anyway, I’m not going to waste one of my 31 days on Rossini….”

“We have a grudge against Rossini?”

“Not as seriously as I have a grudge against a lot of
people,” I told her, “and Beethoven said Rossini’s opera buffa…”

“Ah, opera buffa,” said Lady, “not a great favorite of
mine….”

“It’s just comic opera,” I told her, “unlike opera seria, which is….”

She just gave me a look.

“Anyway, Beethoven liked the opera buffa, but told Rossini
he couldn’t write the serious stuff. Oh, and then there’s his reputed comment;
Rossini would have been a great composer if his teacher had spanked him enough
on the backside….”

“OK, so no Rossini. So now what’s the problem?”

“Well, should I simply devote each day to a different
composer? Sort of, ‘if today is Tuesday, it must be Fauré?’ But there’s a
problem, there….”

“And that is?”

“Oh come on, does that mean that Bach and Beethoven only get
the same attention as Reynaldo Hahn? I mean, I love Hahn, and I wouldn’t be
without Hahn, but still….”

“I see the point,” said Lady. “So spend a week on Bach, if
you’re so inclined….”

“And then, of course, there are all the composers I should
like, and don’t. Which means, of course, that I’m the complete Philistine.
Sorry, but almost everything I’ve ever heard of Debussy make me want to jump
off the balcony, if not the nearest bridge. So though he’s important
compositionally….”

“Compositionally?”

“Sorry—anyway, it’s my book, and if I don’t want to invite
Debussy into it, well, so what? Mr. Fernández loves Debussy, so he can write a
rebuttal, or his own damn book. Anyway, Debussy is out, and very likely so is
Wagner, as well as most of the 20th century. I might make an
exception for Samuel Barber….”

“All of this,” said Lady, “is nothing more than an excuse to
get down to work. You’re throwing up objections simply to avoid getting the
nose anywhere near the grindstone….”

“Easy enough for you to say,” I told her. “But what about
chronology? Shouldn’t we progress in orderly fashion from Monteverdi, say, to
Barber? That seems like the serious thing to do…”

Lady yawned.

“Aren’t you forgetting,” she said, “that this is supposed to
be fun? As in ‘not a chore?’ Anyway, how did you begin to listen to classical
music? Surely your mother didn’t sit you down with a study guide….”

“Absolutely the opposite,” I told her, “my mother, by the
time I came around, was considerably worn down. She had a sort idea that it
didn’t matter much what you did, your child was either going to turn into a
mass murderer or not. Well, she may not have been quite that loose, but still…”

“Well, so what did you listen to, early on?”

“Oddly enough, quite a lot of The Weavers, as well as Burl
Ives. I think my father was into that; it was when she was alone, and very
often when she was editing, that she played classical music. Mostly, of course,
because it’s hard to edit if you’re distracted by the lyrics of ‘itsy bitsy
teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini…’”

“Surely you jest….”

“The fifties brought us many things,” I told her.
“Including, I’m sorry to say, the infamous witch hunts, led by Joe McCarthy from
Appleton, Wisconsin. And oddly, The Weavers and Burl Ives—who I always thought
were hopelessly square and old-fashioned—suffered greatly under McCarthy.
Nothing as seditious as a folksong, is there?”

“Folksongs? Seditious?”

“Surprisingly. After all, when you sing, ‘this land is my
land, this land is your land,’ well…has anyone ever sung ‘this land is
Monsanto’s land?’”

“That actually might not be a bad idea….”

“Well,” said Lady, “since you obviously are turning just a
bit chicken-livered about this whole project, why don’t you simply invite
whatever composer is hanging around, over there in the dining room of Fortaleza
Street? You know, if you really can’t decide, well, let it be open mic. What’s
wrong with that? After all, I do it every Tuesday night at the café….”

“Well,” I said, “if it got me off the hook of deciding on
one masterpiece and throwing out the other, it would be worth it. And it is,
after all, how I came to so much music….”

“So, folksongs?”

“Hmm…folksongs. Wonder what Alfred Deller is doing, at the
moment.”

“I’m right here,” said the disembodied voice. “nor did I
think anybody at all remembered me. It happens, you know. They tell you that
you are immortal, that you’ll never be forgotten, and now, who remembers
Deller? Or my son? Or both of us together, since we often sang together….”

“Oh dear,” said Lady, “is it really starting? And who might
these dellers be?”

“Not dellers, Dellers. And they have every reason to be a
bit miffed. Alfred was the father, and Mark was the son…but they both were
countertenors, which at the time was a bit of an eye opener.”

“Countertenor?”

“It’s a man who is singing in the traditional female vocal
range. And please, don’t get me started on whether it’s falsetto or not. You
never, ever want to get into vocal production, because singers have the
weirdest ideas about what it is, or what it isn’t. Somebody or other—Renée
Fleming, I think, but anyway, somebody famous—seriously thinks that to produce
a beautiful, pianissimo high note, you have to pitch the note through the tiny
little indentation of the nose as it curves towards the cheek. Physiologically
impossible, of course, but who cares? However she does it, or thinks she does
it, well it’s glorious. And of course, could I do it?”

“Am I, or am I not, to be allowed to speak?” Said the
querulous Deller. “I have been, after all, dragged from the dead. Though I must
say, I was hardly the only male alto around: in fact, it was often said that if
they had allowed women in the cathedral choirs, there would have been no male
altos. But as it was, there were many of us….”

“So there were,” I said. “But you were one of the
trailblazers, weren’t you? And now, we have people like David Daniels and
Philippe Jaroussky, but you were standing out there, quite alone, and doing
your thing….”

“The Deller Consort,” said Deller, “we were pioneers in the
early music field.”

“You were,” I said, and thought, but did not say, that his
voice had been sadly surpassed by our current generation of countertenors.
“Well, shall we listen to something? How about ‘She Moved Through the Fair?’ It
has to be one of the most haunting songs in the world. And then, what about
some Vaughan-Williams? It doesn’t seem right to slight poor Vaughan-Williams,
who did so much to save and preserve English folksong. Though really, I think
I’d do ‘Silent Noon,’ since it’s so beautiful, and such a good interpretation
of the text of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. And then, of course, we’d have to do
“Orpheus with his Lute…”

“What? I thought it was just five minutes a day! Three
songs? That’s already 15 minutes!”

“Bother,” I said, “I knew this project was unfeasible from
the start. Well, have another glass of wine. Oh, and I suppose I should pour
another two for you?”

There was no response, as the music soared, but at the end,
Deller and Vaughan Williams had finished their cups.

Tuesday, February 21, 2017

“It’s just not right,” I said, as I often do, to Lady.
“First there were the tragic events in Sweden, which caused me to search
endlessly on the internet, to make sure that ABBA was unaffected….”

“But nothing happened,” said Lady.

“Exactly,” I told her. “And ‘nothing’ is a very terrible
thing, fully and as potentially dangerous as ‘something,’ which can also cause
untold anguish. Indeed, I have suffered through ‘nothing’ thousands if not
millions of times in my life. I sit, for example, at my computer, preparing to
emblazon the world with my words, and what happens?”

“Let me guess,” said Lady.

“I look around my apartment, and where have all the
intentions of doing a little cleaning….”

“I do understand,” said Lady. “At any rate, the Swedes are
quite all right. Although I’m sure they’re grateful for your concern….”

“So if that wasn’t bad enough, I now have a monga.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in monga,” said Lady. “You
once described it as a mythical though dreaded disease occurring when one
raindrop descends on a Puerto Rican.”

“That’s profoundly politically incorrect,” I told her,
“which probably means that yes, I did say it. Anyway, whether I believe it or
not, here it is. In that sense, it’s just like the political situation, or
perhaps the terrible events in Sweden. I can’t believe Donald Trump, so why
shouldn’t something have happened in Sweden, even though I don’t believe….”

“That makes no sense,” said Lady.

“Exactly,” I told her.

“Anyway, what I really should do, since Tuesday morning is
the new Monday morning…”

“What?”

“Presidents’ Day,” I told her. “Anyway, I should get right
down to work, even though what I really want is to go back to bed. But now it’s
time to put aside our grief…”

“Grief?”

“Sweden,” I told her, “how it afflicts the mind, and indeed
the spirit. Well, we have to carry on. Now then, there’s excellent news! An
eye-stabbing flash of light in the vexing question of Russia and the Ukraine!”

In a Twitter post on Monday, he accused American
journalists of glossing over a dark and dangerous situation in Sweden. “Give
the public a break,” he wrote. “The FAKE NEWS media is trying to
say that large scale immigration in Sweden is working out just beautifully.
NOT!”

“A
courageous stand,” said Lady. “Wonderful to know that our president will not
step down, or step back, or step wherever. The Swedes must be breathing
a sigh of relief, knowing they have so ardent a champion in the White House….”

“One begins to wonder,” I told her, “if the atrocities in
Sweden were all a red herring. Or perhaps it’s that damn FAKE NEWS media that
is trying to deflect attention from Trump’s remarkable success, based on the
well-oiled machine he has created from the ruble….”

“Marc, you’re wandering….”

“Russia,” I told her. “You remember, the little problem of
Russia and the Ukraine. Though in fact, the Ukraine is considerably more
affected….”

“Marc?”

“Anyway, we’re well on the way—quite far down the path,
actually—to a true and lasting peace!”

After the lawyers got involved, Trump said he barely
knew who Sater was. But there is voluminous evidence that Sater, a Russian
emigrant, was key to channeling Russian capital to Trump for years. Sater is
also a multiple felon and at least a one-time FBI informant.

“Lovely,”
said Lady, “nice to know we’re getting help from multiple felons. Ah well, any
port in a storm! OK, so why were the lawyers involved?”

“It
all was a messy little business down in Soho,” I told her. “You know, after the
string of bankruptcies, Trump got involved in building a luxury condo / hotel
down in Soho, to the annoyance of all the artists down there. But the project hit
some bumps, especially in the downturn of 2008 and 2009….”

“Well,
well,” said Lady. “And any idea what the plan might entail? The plan to bring
peace to the Ukraine and Russia?”

“Well,
first the authors allege that they have incriminating stuff on the president of
the Ukraine….”

“I
recoil in horror,” said Lady, “though indeed it took me quite a moment to
realize that I had. Never having recoiled for any reason, you know….”

Essentially, his plan would require the withdrawal of
all Russian forces from eastern Ukraine. Ukrainian voters would decide in a
referendum whether Crimea, the Ukrainian territory seized by Russia in 2014,
would be leased to Russia for a term of 50 or 100 years.

“How
can you ‘lease’ a territory as large as the Crimea for 50 to 100 years? And why
do I feel rather doubtful about the validity of any ‘referendum’ that might
take place?”

“Well,
it’s all very strange,” I told her. “Anyway, could I interest you in making a
little donation to my latest charity? I’ll be going forward with it on Facebook
in just a few minutes, but if you’d like to prime the pump, with a donation of
500 dollars or more, I’ll send you a complimentary T-shirt! Just my way of
saying thank you….”

“And
what would that be?”

“’I
stand with Sweden!’’ I told her. “After all, if they can go against the Swedes,
for God’s sake, who among us is safe!”

“Ahhh,”
said Lady, “do you never rest, in your efforts to cozen the weary?”

“Never,”
I told her. “In fact, I wake each morning, filled with dreams of cozening!”

Thursday, February 16, 2017

“All right,” I told her, “today’s problem is what to do
about Matthias Goerne. I’ve finished up with Trump—I got him straightened
around yesterday. So, once everybody gets on the same page—it takes awhile for
some people to catch up with my lightning intellect—we’ll be entirely done with
him! Poosh! Back to reality TV, where we can all safely ignore him!”

“Poosh?” said Lady. “What’s Poosh?”

“It’s the particularly squishy sound that Trump makes when
he goes ‘poof,’” I told her. “No idea why, but there it is….”

“Well, I’m ready to move away from Trump,” said Lady. “In
fact, haven’t I told you that this blog used to be a Trump-free zone? And then,
all of a sudden, there he was! Just as he was on television, every time I
turned it on, and on every magazine cover, every time I went to the grocery
store. It got to be completely annoying….”

“Definitely time for Goerne,” I told her. “You remember what
I told Naïa, all those years ago? Back before the rats….”

Naïa celebrated her fifteenth birthday with the announcement
that she wanted a couple of rats for her birthday. She reported this quite
casually at an art opening that we all attended.

“Ahh,” I told her, “and have you informed your landlord that
you’ll be keeping rats?”

She chose not to respond.

“What about the health department?”

She examined a corner of the ceiling intently.

“And the department of sanitation?”

Began whistling Dixie!

So the rats arrived. But there was, as anyone could have
imagined, a problem. For it turned—and please don’t inquire too much right
here—that the sexes of the rats were disordered. The intention had been to
create a unisex environment, or perhaps a homosexual environment. But it turned
out that one of the rats was male. Or perhaps it was female—I don’t remember.
Anyway, it was some unwanted sex.

“So we had to call the guy in the outskirts of Caguas,” said
Lady. “And he got upset and complained, but he eventually came. But it took him
so long, that he came at rush hour, and the traffic was terrible. And then he
couldn’t find parking, so he was calling us every two minutes, threatening to
turn around and go back to Caguas. So by the time he arrived, everybody was in
quite a state….”

“Well, of course,” I told her. “What did you expect, when
you agreed to go along with such lunacy? And whoever heard of a fifteen-year
old girl wanting rats?”

“What’s wrong with rats?” asked Lady. “And what should she
want?”

“A horse,” I told her. “Which would be entirely more
sensible. You can keep it in the shower stall—it’ll be entirely content there….”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Lady. “And how would we shower?”

“Atop the horse,” I told her. “Thus solving two problems at
once. Oh, and the water will whisk away any little waste the horse might have
shed….”

Lady went off to paint some houses—her own personal variant
of whistling Dixie.

So the man with the rats—or the rattor—arrived with an assortment of rats, all of the desired sex.
Naïa, unable to make up her mind, chose two. Oh, and that’s in addition to the
two she already had. So that left the odd rat, of the errant sex, but the
rattor had the solution!

And that was?

Throw the damn rat over the balcony and go home!

Both Lady and Naïa were outraged.

“Well, it sounds like a perfectly sensible solution to me,”
I told her. “After all, that rat was shop-worn. In fact, it was a used rat—and
who’s going to buy that? Besides, the rat will have a perfectly splendid time
in Old San Juan, with its many exotic restaurants and their attached dumpsters.
Monday, it’s Vietnamese! Tuesday…”

Lady was outraged.

“You can’t have a rat eating out of a dumpster!” she
snorted.

“That is precisely,” I began.

“So then Naïa began to tear up, and it was her fifteenth
birthday, after all, so we decided: we will keep the rat, even with the
aberrant sex…..”

“This is getting to be like the Trump presidency after all,”
I told her. “It’s going on and on, and the sordid details keep getting worse
and worse.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” said Lady. “Because we
decided: the rat would have to be fixed.”

“Fixed?”

“De-sexed,” said Lady. “You know, castrated….”

“What!” I told her. “You’re actually going to spend good
money….”

Well, there was a problem, of course. And that was: who
would fix the rat?

“The vet up the street from the café just laughed,” said
Lady.

“The vet up the street charges people just for walking past
his shop,” I told Lady. “Anyway, now you see the advantage of a horse….”

“Well, so we finally found one,” said Lady, “though it was
out on 65th Infantry….”

65th Infantry is a charming road, with only two
little problems. First, every driver on the Eastern half of Puerto Rico is on
it, stalled, and honking their horns. Second, it will then start to rain, and
the road will instantly be completely flooded.

“You actually went out to 65th Infantry?” I asked
her. “And did you get your will written? Your affairs sorted out? And why
didn’t we know about this, so that we could have given a farewell party?”

“So we get to the vet,” said Lady, who has either learned
from or taught to Naïa the fine art of ignoring, “and it turns out, yes! The
vet will be happy to fix the rat!”

“Microsurgery,” I said, “though come to think of it, maybe
he could do a job on Trump….”

Dirty look….

“Sorry,” I told her, “you know, it’s my King Charles’ head…”

She gives me the punch line.

“But it will cost a hundred bucks…..”

I’m speechless.

Fortunately, that doesn’t last long.

“You are absolutely NOT,” I begin.

“But then guess what,” Lady surges on. “It turns out that
we’ve been to the vet before. In fact, that’s where we got Lorca!”

Federico García Lorca—in the rarified world of the Poets’
Passage, that’s a toy Chihuahua.

“And you know what? It turns out that we have a credit! They
charged us for a medicine or a shot or something. Anyway, it was 90 dollars,
and they kept it for us! Unbelievable!”

“Absolutely, since every one of those businesses on 65th
Infantry is a den of thieves,” I told her.

“So now, it’s only going to cost us 10 bucks,” said Lady.

“And how much did you pay for the rat,” I asked.

“Well, that was only one buck….”

“Anyway,” I told her, “it’s not costing you ten bucks. You
should ask for the ninety dollars back, get rid of the rat, and hold tight for
a couple of days. Then I’ll go down to the bus depot, and pick up a couple
specimens for Naïa.”

“It won’t be the same,” said Lady. “Naïa has fallen in love
with that rat….”

She goes away, and I’m left thinking. Wasn’t today going to
be the day to worry about Matthias Goerne? But then Lady reappears.

“Don’t tell Nico about the 100 bucks,” she tells me. Nico is
her husband, a Frenchman. They like snails, but not rats.

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

I needed a reality
check, last night, so I tried it out at dinner last night on Mr. Fernández:

“General Flynn called up the Russian ambassador and told him
not to worry about the sanctions: Trump would take care of them. But Trump
didn’t know a thing about the call, much less approve of it.”

Mr. Fernández just gave me a look.

I told you I needed a reality check, and that’s part of the
story. But it’s more than that. I needed the answer to the question: why did we
cede our government so easily, and so quickly?

Trump did what Trump does: he got the deal done. He’s been
doing it ever since he first moved into Manhattan. Then, decades ago, the city
was crumbling, the infrastructure was destroyed, crime was rampant, and the tax
base eroded. So when Trump wanted to buy the Commodore Hotel, the city was more
than happy.

I read about it in the book Trump Revealed; the details
of the scheme escape me, but the essence is this. Trump had little money,
and no history of doing a deal of that scope. Nonetheless, he was able to trick
the city of New York into thinking he had financing (he sent them some papers,
but they were unsigned), and also into giving him a 40-year tax break. Trump
claimed that nobody else would have done the deal; in fact, several other
developers did similar projects, without the gravy thrown in.

Trump, in short, is the grown if not matured version of the
bully / show-off that you hated in junior high school. I get that, though I
don’t like it.

What don’t I get?

I don’t get why everybody went along with it.

I tried to believe that the Republicans didn’t go along with
it. In a sane world, having virtually every ex-president say that Trump was
going to be a complete disaster….well, shouldn’t that carry some weight? And
then came one outrage after another. Trump wouldn’t release his tax returns? We
had just started to get upset, when he told us: not paying taxes meant he was
smart.

It went on and on. He admitted he groped women, and then
threatened to sue The New York Times. Finally, somebody acted like a grownup,
and put him in his spot: the Times wasn’t defaming him, it was confirming his
statements.

So then Trump sewed up the nomination, but surely the men
(sorry, but there it is…men) in charge would prevent so disastrous a
candidate from being chosen, right?

In fact, the convention was deeply disturbing. People who
know Hillary are said to like her very much. But even if you don’t know her or
don’t like her, can anything excuse the vitriol against her in the convention?

Lock her up????

Where was the convention held—Caracas? (Apologies to my
Venezuelan friends….)

Nothing had been normal for a long time. Did it start when
Obama was first elected, and then refused to enact his program? Remember all
that time ago? Remember him trying to be the great conciliator, bring everybody
to the table? Getting everybody who could be gotten onto the same page?

Remember what a bust that was?

They vilified the man, and would he respond? No—he kept on
being calm and reasonable, and that drove them more nuts. So he produced his
birth certificate and went on doing his best. Which wasn’t bad: the BBC reported
that two polls had found that 60% of the public approved of Obama by the end of
his term.

But the Republicans had the taste of blood in their mouth,
and nowhere was it more evident than in their declaration that they would not
replace the seat that Justice Scalia left vacant.

This was unprecedented. And did it matter how much the left
howled? No, because who cared? The base of the Republican Party no longer
responded to what The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN was saying. And
worse, the Supreme Court itself did absolutely nothing. Did any of them speak
out, to defend their institution? No, they were as mute as mules, with the one
exception of….

So the Supreme Court snoozed away while its integrity got
torn to shreds. Which meant and means that now we have no Supreme Court,
because anything less than a unanimous decision is going to be suspect. And
what, by the way, will happen if Trump decides to challenge the Ninth Circuit
of Appeals’ decision on the illegality of Trump’s immigration ban? How will the
Republicans react to a 4-4 decision, should it come to that? Then, the appeals
court will be upheld—and how is that going to play? A constitutional crisis?

So the last six months have been a long, drawn-out and
endless replay of that moment when, sitting frozen behind the steering wheel,
you see the semi jump lanes and bear down on you.

It was unreal: the CIA, the FBI and everybody else and his
brother said it. The Russians had interfered with the elections. And did
anything Trump do or say indicate that they had not? Could anything be more
blatant than Trump’s statements and actions? Or did we need to hear, “steal our
vote!” shouted repeatedly at the convention, the way we heard, “lock her up!”?

So now it was that some sore losers—in fact the majority of
voters—couldn’t get over the fact that the opponent won. And nobody said the
obvious: this was a tainted election. The Russians screwed around with the most
element of our democracy. We have to investigate, correct the situation, and do
the election over. And right, this time.

This is what happens in junior high school, right?

But wait—it wasn’t just that Trump may or may not have been
elected legitimately! In fact, Trump was conducting business before he
had been sworn in! And so I sat around, one morning, and wondered: how could a
president-elect summon every last ambassador home? Oh, and did any one of them
say, “hey, you’re not my boss yet?” And where, dammit, was the boss?
Because it’s time, Obama, to shoot a little of the spleen over at you.

It was, in fact, perhaps the most appalling sight of the
whole election: Obama receiving Trump in the White House, Michelle serving tea
(or whatever) to Melania. And what, by the way, was most shameful? This week,
The New York Times had to chastise a female reporter who said, privately at a
dinner, that Melania was a “hooker.”

Remember that old adage? If the question, “is she a lady”
has to be asked, then you already have the answer? Sorry, but after you pose
nude and handcuffed in a private jet for GQ
magazine…well, the question of whether you’re a hooker or not becomes
almost moot.

In short—absolutely everybody stood by and watched a sick
fraud assume the presidency of the country through a fraudulent election.

So here we are. We are busy trying to wonder, as Bernie
Sanders said on Facebook this morning, what the president knew, and when.

Know what?

I don’t give a flying eff what the “president” knew or when.
I do give that eff about the fact that for the first time in my life, I had to
watch somebody steal the election. And I had to watch us all watch him, while
we did nothing.

It’s a little hard to imagine where this is going, but does
anybody imagine that it’s good? And the Republicans—what are they going to do
about this train wreck? Paul Ryan, of Janesville, Wisconsin? Saying that he
“supported” Trump, late in the campaign, but that he would no longer “defend”
him?

Hunh?

Well, it’s time to do what we have to do.

We have to get our ex-presidents together, from Jimmy Carter
through Barack Obama.

All of them.

And then they have to go to the Organization of American
States.

Remember them? The OAS?

Well, I looked them up, and they can help! Here’s the
description, from their website:

The right to universal suffrage by secret ballot is a
cornerstone of the democratic system. It is imperative that citizens of every
county be able to rely on electoral processes that are free, peaceful and
transparent. The independent, impartial observation of elections lends
transparency and confidence to the electoral process and is one of the basic
tools the OAS has to help strengthen democracy in the region. The Organization
also provides support in the aftermath of elections, helping countries in their
own efforts to strengthen the electoral system and make it more transparent.

Wow—nice to know!

I’m kidding, of course.

Wait—am I?

Who knows? But why do I feel that, like asking whether a
woman is a lady, asking whether an election is fraudulent is…

Life, Death and Iguanas

Life, Death…and Iguanas?Yes, that’s the title of an e-book available on Amazon / Kindle. It’s the story of a woman who took charge of her death, just as she had her life. Of a family that split, and then united. Of a man who decided to live. Oh, and there’s some great stuff about iguanas….Read the first chapter by clicking here!